Friday, April 15, 2011

The Caltech Alpine Club, already such a productive font of adventure, has delivered yet again. This time, the order of the day was skiing, instead of trudging into thin air.

I packed in the usual frantic way, made rendezvous with two geologists, and proceeded to a high speed 4 hour guided tour of the Owens Valley. I had previously driven here to climb Mt Whitney, but the days were shorter and I had not seen much of the fascinating scenery in one of the world's most seismically active regions. Previously, for instance, I had had no idea that I didn't properly understand how columnar basalt forms.

As we wound up the road to about 2500m it began to snow heavily, and by the time I'd hired my gear and we'd found the apartment, the roads were quite dodgy. More than 12 inches fell, which was terrific! We were condo stacking, so I picked out a nice patch of floor for my sleeping bag, traumatized everyone by walking around in thermals, and waited while everyone arrived. By breakfast, 18 people had slept over, which certainly kept the place warm. We even had someone sleeping under the table!

Before long we'd driven to the lift and started up the mountain. A few easy runs to make up for 3 years of inactivity, then we hit the turbo quad to the top and powder heaven.

I had last skied 3 years ago while training through Bulgaria, and wearing jeans etc managed to get stuck somewhere in the back country. I survived that time, only to be chased by hungry streetkids that evening at the train station in Sofia...

We decided to traverse to the other side of the mountain and my companions D and E got stuck, as snowboards have poor glide characteristics. Soon after we negotiated a series of ungroomednirvana. I stopped to catch my breath, disguised behind ski glasses and an outlandishly enormous Russian fur hat, only to hear a nearby skier say "are you a Caltech grad student?" Why yes indeed.

A, her friends C and T skied with us for a while, with several hilarious crashes and no tree collisions. I got thirsty so filled a ziplock bag with snow and put it in my pocket.

At length we returned to Eagle lift and met with two beginner boarder friends of ours, Z and H. Both were already exhausted, but we convinced Z to go up the lift and come down the run, about 10 times slower than usual. Z was wearing jeans, which were already pretty wet, as were his gloves. His intention to go down the easiest run was dealt a serious blow when he lacked the turning skills necessary to turn away from an intermediate slope. But he stuck it out and by the time he reached the bottom was edging well enough to carve down the last bit. Spectacular took a turn for the sublime when he collided with a lift tower! Fortunately he was moving very slowly. The next day he was still improving, but managed to take out a sign that said 'slow', again, right in front of me.

We headed off the mountain and I passed out back at the lodge. Next came dinner, again everyone wearing their best thermals, white wine chilled in a pile of snow on the balcony, and mountains of food to replenish our reserves. After failing for the 50th time to get thewifi working, we fell asleep.

Next morning, D decided to try skiing, so after an awful breakfast of corn flakes and mineral water (it seemed like a good idea at the time) we hit the slopes. D stepped into his skis, and boarded the lift with the confidence of man who knows he's wearing 10lbs of body armor. Which he was. The first order of the day was the run Z tumbled down the previous afternoon, and D did not disappoint. He decided to skip the snow plough and start paralleling, and within 30 minutes was linking turns like a pro. I demonstrated how to carve turns for speed (or 'rail'), and succeeded in my efforts to fall over.

A few runs later we decided to maintain the learning curve by heading up Cloud 9 to Ricochet, also known as McCluskie's Eternal Regret. In my mind, at any rate. The first few turns in particular were hair raising, but D didn't fall until the flat bit at the bottom. Meanwhile more than a few hair raising beginners coasted past in outrageous snowploughs, ignorant of their total lack of control. D worked on his pro-valley stance and we tacked inwards to main, caught up withprimary organizers extraordinaire D2 and D3, and ate lunch. During this run D achieved his penultimate and 13th fall on skis, right next to the Mammoth fumarole. It smelt like volcano and made me happy. Mammoth is, to the best of my knowledge, an eroded but active lava dome.

We ducked back to the car so D could get his trusty board (recently repaired after a nasty run-in with a rock), then hit the slopes on the back side of the mountain. The mountain remained uncrowded and supremely awesome. The vertiginous couloirs above us beckoned 'test yourself!', but it wasn't until we headed back that we found ourselves by accident on the edge of a rather steep slope. We dropped over a cornice and traversed the worst of moguls that seemed to grow from cornices and then ripped down the side of the mountain. We raced down the mountain at terminal velocity, reaching the home lift 25 seconds before it closed. One final run on empty sloped, catching some persistent freshies between trees, and then down to the carpark.

Back at the place we packed and cleaned, piled into a car with R, F, H, D4 and me, and herded aggressively back to LA to the tunes of Iron Maiden. We stopped at Lone Pine to stare at Mt Whitney in the sunset and eat some buffalo burgers. The conversation shifted to the pros andcons of dating within Caltech (hypothetically, of course), and by midnight I was back on campus with only 72 hours of work to catch up on.

Friday, April 8, 2011

The mask of sorrow is a large concrete sculpture sited on a hilloverlooking Magadan. In broadest terms it is reminiscent of the moaistatues on Rapa Nui, but exceeds them in both scale and scope.

Originally conceived as one of six similar statues arrayed in ahexagon throughout the former soviet union, to the best of myknowledge it is the only one that has been completed. In purpose, itcommemorates the terrible lives and deaths of the prisoners who passedthrough Magadan as part of the dalstroi (Far Northern Construction)effort which began in 1930, expanded enormously through the prewarpurges of 1937, and was officially ended by Kruschev's pardon ofStalin's prisoners in 1956. At its height, more than 12 millionRussian citizens were convicted under article 58, for politicalcrimes, and were sent to work camps for the 'reforging of the criminalspirit' to labour for 10 years or more. These works camps were arrayedthroughout the soviet union, but the most infamous by far were themines of Kolyma. When people refer to mines of Siberia, they refer toKolyma. This is not the self imposed exile of the intelligentsia afterthe failed uprising of 1839 to cities in Siberia such as Krasnoyarskand Irkutsk that subsequently became centers of learning.

Kolyma is a region in the far east of Russia, well beyond Siberia. Anumber of great rivers flow from the central asian highlands throughRussia to the Arctic Ocean. From west to east, they are the NorthernDvina, the Pechora, the Ob, the Yenisei, the Lena, the Indigirka, andthe Kolyma. With the exception of the Indigirka, all are navigablealong most of their length from source to ocean. Each is a story initself, however here I am concerned with the Kolyma river. Like manyof its northern cousins, during the bitterly cold winter it sometimesfreezes all the way through, leading to the formation of ice dams andflash flooding. From the ocean it rises towards the south, andeventually tracks west at the point where it meets the highway atDebin, which is also known as 'Left Bank'. Debin was the headquartersof dalstroi for most of the 1930s, and remained an important centerwith a major hospital until perestroika. When I visited, nearly everybuilding was abandoned, and its population currently stands at about80. During the WW2 the hospital was frequently home to (inter alia) aconvicted nuclear scientist called Kipreev who managed to build anxray machine. Shalamov worked as an orderly in the hospital prior tohis release after 17 years of labour, and eventually returned to themainland.

It is hard to describe the isolation of these places. Magadan is atown on the coast of the Sea of Okhost. Within quotation marks, it isthe only town. There have been other towns at other times on the shoresince the 1600s, when the Russian sled route first reached thepacific, but with the exception of Sovgavan', more than 1000km away,it is the only one of any size that is left. Magadan, which I havewritten about before, is an astonishing city, the gateway to theRussian Far East, to Kolyma, and the still productive mines in theregion. Even today, in the age of trans-oceanic jet liners, it remainsremote. I will describe the usual path of convict to these places togive an idea of how remote these places were - prisons like convictAustralia, from which escape is meaningless.

After the usual formalities of accusation, constant interrogation, andbeatings, a person convicted under article 58 would be transfered to aholding prison, which in Moscow was the famous Butyr prison. From herethey would be loaded on a prison train car and taken by train tosovgavan', probably a 20 day journey in those days from one side ofRussia to the other. From here they were loaded on steamers to takethem to Magadan, a 3 to 5 day cruise, and in Magadan they were placedin prisoner camps before being divided up, allocated a work site, andsent there. Before that, of course, they came to terms with the natureof criminal life in Russia, which to this day involves asemi-exclusive language, a strict hierarchy, and complete degradation.Usually clothes would be confiscated before prisoners were marched500km up the highway to Debin, where they would be fanned out to oneof hundreds of work camps in the area, most accessible only by river(at least in the early days). As the decade progressed, punishmentsfor escapees and transgressors became more serious, the roads wereimproved and lengthened, and by about 1938 it was possible to travelfrom Magadan to Yakutsk via the original Kolyma highway. Still, travelwithout freedom or permits was almost impossible.

I don't intend to dwell here on the conditions suffered by theprisoners, or try and give any account of the experience. There are anumber of excellent books on the subject by survivors, includingVarlam Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales", and Alexander Solzhenitsn's "TheGulag Archipelago". The bottom line is that more than 3 million peopleperished at the camps, mostly between 1937 and the early 1950s.

This is a legacy that cannot be forgotten, marginalised, or undone.Kruschev's 'rehabilitation' meant little except for a small number ofsurvivors who, having been released years previously, were finallypermitted to leave the far east and return to their homes. Despitethis horrific past, the taiga and the extremes of climate have all buterased tangible memories of the camps, few of which were built to alasting standard in any case. In the 20 years since perestroika, theregion has depopulated by more than a factor of 2, and some cities,such as Kadykchan, have been completely abandoned.

Which brings me back to the mask of sorrow monument. It is large inscale, and depicts a stylised mask. Within the interior of thesculpture is a small one room museum. One eye is the bars of a prisoncell. The other eye, weeping, has tears in the form of people crying.Around the sculpture are a number of concrete plinths with religioussymbols of the faiths of people who died, some of whom were prisonersof war. Some of the main camps are also named. Yet for many locals andvisitors, the most important question is of its fundamental nature.Why a mask, and not a face. Why is the mask sorrowful, and not anactual person. In my mind, the mask symbolises a disconnect betweenthe people changed by suffering into something different, between thehorrific history and the need to go on with life, and between regretand an inability to rationalise, explain, or otherwise understand theprofound pointlessness of the spilling of that much blood. In a way, amask can be used to express a desired emotion, while concealingconflicting feelings which continue to lurk deeper still.

Nearly everyone who lives in Magadan today is unrelated by business orblood to the gulag. They are as aware as anyone of the past and itsweight, but Kolyma remains a perilous place to live and work. Onecannot dwell excessively on the past and still expect to make asuccess of the present. Most of my exploration of the history hasoccurred since I returned. When I visited, I was more interested (andremain so) in the people living there today, rather than the all butvanished history of the place. Yet the character of a city and itsinhabitants cannot be divorced from their awareness of the past.Ultimately, however, the past is too confronting to worry about everyday. The lessons to be learned are either too obvious or too subtle tobe taken in one sitting. In every way, the human tragedy in Kolymaexceeded any person's will to survive, to be tough, to be human. Inthe opinion of a number of people I talked to, even the people who didnot die, did not survive. And that, if anything, is the reason why themask of sorrow is a mask. Why it, as a work of art and a monument,encompasses so much of the dissonance of that part of the world. Adissonance that will not be understood until it is forgotten.